Energetic materials (EMs) including propellants, explosives and pyrotechnics are being widely used in both civilian and military fields such as automobile airbags, belt tensioners, mining, off-shore drilling, de-construction, heat sources for rapid fuses, joining of materials by means of localized heating, metal cutting, underwater welding, micropropulsion systems, percussion or electric primers, explosive additives, propellant rate modifiers, arms fire, and safety and arming devices used in missiles or rockets. In addition, nanoscale energetic materials (nEMs) have received growing interests because of the greatly improved performance in reaction propagation rate, ignition or onset-reaction temperature, ignition delay, and volumetric energy density compared with traditional EMs (e.g. gun powder and trinitrotoluene (TNT)).
However, the performance of nEMs will be significantly reduced by moisture in the air and furthermore, nEMs cannot react underwater. Moisture and/or water will permeate into the reactant mixture of the nEMs, which results in disintegration of the reactants before ignition and reaction, or the reaction will be quenched after ignition. Nevertheless, there has been no precedent report of waterproof nEMs or structures which allow the use of nEMs under moisture and/or water.